I'm thinking about getting Lightroom 4, any thoughts and comments are welcome. i use DPP and elements 10 which i find rather complicated.... Pros and cons are welcome.

Thanks

Like any other software, that you use for the first time, there is a definite learning curve with Lightroom, but the beauty of LR is that there are tonnes of free tutorials available online, especially on youtube ... take for example, when you do a search for "Lightroom 4" in youtube, you will get over 7000 videos and the majority of them are tutorials on how to use it, tips and tricks and many other cool stuff that you can do with LR4 .... now that's just in youtube, there are scores of other websites that are devoted to Lightroom teaching you for free of charge that you literally do not need to buy any book or course. In contrast when you do a search, in youtube, for Canon DPP you will get less than 400 videos. So the benefits of Lightroom is free and abundant learning anytime, anywhere ... I download lots of videos from youtube to my iPhone and play them whenever I need some pointers, tips etc.

And yes, you can use the "Edit In" feature of Lightroom to open a rendered photo (in PSD, TIFF, etc format) right in Photoshop Elements Editor just like full Photoshop. When you save the photo and return to LR it's in the catalog as another version of the original, and you can even do LR editing on top of it (but opening it back in PS makes more sense to me). The nice thing is you can export, watermark, print etc the PSD/TIFF right from LR just like RAW/DNG files you've edited in LR natively. Very seamless.

A PS instructor at our University told us Elements was released as a light version optimized for photo editing, so what you mainly loose are some of the exotic design tools. I think LR 4 + PS Elements 10/11 is a killer combo.

I have been a Lightroom user ever since the very first public beta. I love it. Each power hungry version delivers better conversions and had expanded functionality. It's huge. You can do most things in LR but I would not envisage using it without it's 1st Cousin, Photoshop. For me that's CS5, but Elements 10 has a high percentage of the functionality of the full version. It's no lightweight program.

However, if you're on a Mac, at least do a test drive of Aperture. It's far more straightforward and does very fine conversions and has other useful functions. There are plenty of user guides around online for Aperture.